Would it make sense to have a “layout persona”?

[GarryP]

Managing columns, rows, guides and grids is currently done via various manager dialogs and is a little bit ’old school’ considering how smoothly the rest of the software works.
Would it be possible, or even make sense, to have a new persona where we can manage all of this kind of thing?

I don’t know how this would work with Publisher and its master pages (e.g. different guides in different master pages) but I think it would make Designer easier to use.

I’m imagining features such as being able to:
* use power duplicate on guides;
* group or mass-select guides to manipulate them together;
* drag the grid itself to change its size and orientation;
* save guides/layouts for import into multiple projects;
...and I’m sure other people have better ideas.

I haven’t thought this through very much so there could be major problems with the idea but I wanted to throw it out into the community to see what people thought about it.

[earl_grey]

the current division horizontal and vertical guide is very bad. it's better to add rotations for guide. 

[gabriel_komorov]

22 hours ago, GarryP said:

I haven’t thought this through very much so there could be major problems with the idea

No, it has perfect sense. In fact this is exactly how it works in Corel - guides have their own layer, and each one is treated like object, so you can group them, rotate, move, delete etc. separately or in bunch. You can even change their color to make them more visible in certain scenarios.

Current implementation of guides managment by Serif is very cumbersome and not intuitive at all.

[GarryP]

I think the guides and grids are handled in a little bit of a ‘clunky’ way at the moment. They feel like a bolt-on compared to the rest of the software. Guides and grids are the foundation of a lot of document layouts and illustrations so I think it would be good if the functionality relating to them was handled a bit more ‘smoothly’.
Another example that popped into my head was: If the grid could be manipulated by dragging vertices, a designer could draw an object and then drag the grid to suit that object instead of messing around with a dialog (see my very crude example GIF - I’m sure it can be done much better, I’m just manipulating a bitmap fill to try and put the point across).